Due to the ongoing COVID-19 emergency, restaurant-going in the UK has been suspended. Visit Harden’s on Twitter and Instagram to keep up with the latest news. Please support the trade at this difficult time: use the links provided to the restaurant's own website
and social media to discover any delivery, take-away or voucher schemes being run during the emergency.

Ordinary diners who take part in our annual survey each spring review restaurants and leave their feedback, but we also ask them to score restaurants from 1-5 on food, service and ambience. Harden’s then uses an average of these scores and measures them against other establishments in the same price bracket to arrive at the ratings published in the guide and online.

Snippets from some of your feedback may end up in the overall Harden’s review, noticeably they appear in “double quotation marks”. The rest of our pithy, bite-sized restaurant summaries are compiled by analysing the survey data and extracting recurring themes, looking at whether or not a venue was nominated in any of our categories – like ‘favourite’ or ‘most overpriced’ – and, of course, looking at the ratings for food, service and ambience.

The Harden’s ratings indicate that a restaurant is:

exceptional very good good average poor

All reviews are compiled from survey comments and ratings, without any regard for our own personal opinions, except in cases where restaurants are too new to have been included in the survey. If you want the editors’ view on new restaurants in London you can find them in our Editors’ Review section.

Harden's Guides have been compiling reviews of the best Italian restaurants in Manchester since 1991.

“A see-and-be-seen venue” – this “vibrant and longstanding Italian” is one of the most successful in the national chain and one of the city-centre’s key “glitzy” haunts. But whereas fans praise “great food, it at footballer prices”, mere mortals can feel ignored: “staff are disinterested unless your face fits (i.e. you’re a footballer or some other celeb!”).

With its menu of quality Venetian tapas, this bright city-centre staple (on the ground floor of Kendal’s the department store, but with its own entrance) wins consistently good feedback from reporters. Those who find its glam namesake a bit snotty say “the service especially is miles better here than at its bigger sibling nearby”.

“Extremely authentic pasta from Puglia” (“you smell how fantastic it is going to be”) has been successfully duplicated from the Altrincham original at this larger Ancoats spin-off, where “the wine is great value, served in painted jugs”. “The minus has got to be the huge warehouse-y, new-build space, which is of a type that’s abundant in Manchester, but cold and samey”.

Going strong for a decade and looking good after a revamp – Rio Ferdinand’s glossy Italian restaurant and cocktail bar in a “lovely listed building” with twin domed ceilings is rated well across the board for its “exceptional atmosphere” and “great food”.

In a converted railway arch near Victoria Station – opposite the now-sadly-defunct Umezushi – this little 12-seater specialises in different varieties of pasta and dumplings from all over Europe: many of course of Italian inspiration, but including, for example, Polish pierogi. It opened after the survey had started in April 2019 – too late for feedback – but the word on the street is that it’s very good.